Intel's Custom Chips Highlight Company’s 14 nm Process

That threat, along with Intel's failure to keep pace in the market for mobile and handheld computing devices, led competitors to charge that the leading-edge technological capabilities that kept Intel on top of the semiconductor market for decades had become irrelevant in markets dominated by ARM architectures and chips from smartphone-processor market leader Qualcomm.

The delay Intel was forced to announce in all but the "M" and desktop versions of its 14 nm "Broadwell" processors to the fourth quarter of 2014 rather than the first quarter of 2014 added fuel to the fire.

Announcing the 14 nm version of the SerDes chips from the custom foundry business, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich has previously spoken of the chip company’s manufacturing prowess as a way to compensate for weak sales in the mobile market, gives Intel a chance to highlight the 14 nm process available only to it, and reinforce its message of technical superiority, even in the absence of much of its other 14 nm processor products.

"This announcement is just the first of many exciting announcements we will make regarding the benefits of using Intel's industry-leading 14 nm Tri-gate process technology and game changing advanced IP," according to a statement from Anurag Handa, senior director, Marketing and Business Development, Intel Custom Foundry.

The demo only proves that Intel has a 14 nm process ready. It does not yet convince this process does not suffer significantly from the highlighted cost of increased amount of double patterning. We need the disclosure of how many layers require double patterning for example. It is likely more than for 22 nm. If not much more, then maybe it can be said to be advantageous for Intel.

My understanding is that SerDes is a tiny <1mm2 circuit (A 4-channel, 28Gb/s at 28nm, was 3.34mm2, see LSI's paper at ISSCC'14). While this is a good demo, it does not say anything about yield and performance of microprocessor chips that are two orders of magnitude larger.

I have not read the McKinsey report but according to this article: dropping below 20nm "requires updates in fabrication facilities that could cost more than $10 billion." But Intel said once that about 80-90% of 20nm equipment is usable at the 14nm node. Why is the cost in the McKinsey report so high?

Good to read that Intel is still pushing the boundaries for others to follow. The only concern is Intel's inability to break the ranks of the likes of ARM, Qualcomm etc in mobile and lower power devices. I think that the main reason behind all the problems is Intel's stubborness to share IP/platform with others. Intel must create an ecosystem for others to join and flourish.